George Stiff

Who was George Stiff?

George Stiff was an English engraver and newspaper proprietor.

Stiff worked as foreman of the engravers in the Illustrated London News before becoming a newspaper proprietor himself in the 1840s. A paper called The Illustrated Weekly Times failed after a few weeks, but The London Journal was a huge success as a penny fiction weekly. By 1847 Stiff was able to begin the Weekly Times: this "would eventually become one of the four high-circulation threepenny Sunday papers which dominated the mid-century middle-market for news, with Reynolds's [Weekly] Newspaper, Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, and the News of the World."